Example Using SMS To Choose Boot Device

Technote (FAQ)

Question

Needing to boot from a specific disk, use SMS to select the boot device.

Answer

This is an example of booting into SMS mode on a pSeries machine in order to select a device to boot from.

To enter SMS mode, you can either press 1 when prompted by the system, or if the host is an LPAR attached to an HMC you can select the LPAR, pull down Operations -> Activate, then select Advanced -> Boot Mode -> SMS

At this point you can either choose a specific boot device or let the firmware probe for all bootable devices. If 7 is chosen it will report back on any bootable adapters, and list any disks that are found to have an AIX boot image on them.

In this example I have chosen "List all Devices", and after probing it finds 2 SAN-attached disks and one virtual Ethernet adapter. In this case hdisk0 is the disk in position 1 and hdisk1 is the disk in position 4.